Spending Review Thread

[Fambo Number Mive]

The "Festival of Brexit" is still going to get £29m in this week's Spending Review.

It is part of a £152million pot for post-coronavirus partying in 2022 to be announced in the spending review.

There will also be £5m for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations across a four-day weekend in 2022.

And £118m will go towards the Commonwealth Games, due to be hosted in Birmingham in summer that year...

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/festival-brexit-set-29m-weeks-23054376

Just utterly shameful. And Sunak will be prime minister in a couple of years.

[DistressedArea]

Hearing rumours they're going to slash billions off the budget for nicknacks. MOD up in arms.

Also hearing that Sunak plans to spend the rainy day money on a multi-gym. Apparently he's picked out the one he wants in the Argos catalogue, and it's the one with a pec deck.

[DistressedArea]

"We can have one new missile, but only if we cut down on days out!" Flipping heck.

[DistressedArea]

That's all for now, I'll keep you posted if I hear anything new.

[Dr Trouser]

Blimey PMQs is fucking shit isn't it?

Also what the hell are 'green collar jobs'?

[DistressedArea]

Think a greencollar is like a posh cucumber. Not sure.

[Bazooka]

Blimey PMQs is fucking shit isn't it?

Also what the hell are 'green collar jobs'?

Slang for sprout pickers.

[Fambo Number Mive]

More dog in the manager nonsense.

The chancellor says the statistics "remind us of something else" - that the virus has "deepened the disparity between public and private sector wages".

He says in the six months to September, private sector wages fell by nearly 1% compared to last year, while public sector wages rose by nearly 4%.

Mr Sunak says, as a result, he "cannot justify a significant, across-the-board pay increase for all public sector workers".

Instead, he says the government will target "our resources at those who need it most"...

Sunak doesn't seem to understand that, if public sector workers have less money, they will spend less money and therefore the services and retail sector will make less money, leading to job cuts in the private sector.

Public sector workers such as firefighters, police officers and nurses haven't been able to work from home during the pandemic. Teachers have been rising their lives in classes of 30 children during the pandemic, and work way over their contracted hours. Imagine if we paid teachers for the hours they worked not just the hours they were contracted for. Their jobs are far more risky than most private sector jobs, very few people in the private sector have to make life or death decisions.

Sunak's annouced a pay rise for NHS workers but everyone else will have to live off claps.

[Paul Calf]

He understands. He just doesn't fucking care.

[Paul Calf]

Look, he's get four, maybe five years of top grifting left - perhaps more if he gets to be PM. IN that time he has to pass as much legislation and as many budgetary commitments as he can to please the people who'll employ him when he gets bored of politics. All the money he makes from this will go offshore or into capital and asset management funds so he doesn't really give a fuck whether the economy tanks as long as it doesn't do it in a way that pisses off the people who are important to him.

[Paul Calf]

That involves maintaining and accelerating the upward flow of wealth. He's doing exceptionally well at that.

He must pretend that the class war is over so no-one notice that elitist shit-miners like him have won it.

[Dr Trouser]

How much money does he actually need? at some point you'd have to say 'yeah that'll so me until death, cheerio fuckers'. Why the endless sucking off the teat?

[GMTV]

The planned new National Infrastructure Bank is a good move, but its jobs shouldn't be limited to picking up the slack left by the European Investment Bank, according to Michael Watson, head of the global Finance and Projects Group at law firm Pinsent Masons

"The financing and funding of new technology at scale needs to be its number one priority to kick-start the UK economy and take proactive steps towards net zero goals," he said.

The bank could at least, in part, effectively act as a large scale venture capital fund - at a pivotal time when the infrastructure and energy sectors are at an inflexion point and intervention is needed to accelerate change and galvanize new technologies."


Brilliant, a new bank setup specifically to line the pockets of all the various shysters of the day, with the vaguely moral justification of 'green' projects and technologies so we can't really complain about it.

[JaDanketies]

Sad that the public sector has to conform to the whims of the private sector, who are all about exploiting as much of your labour as possible for as little remuneration as possible. If we're waiting for private sector employers to decide to be generous to their employers on their own back before we increase public sector wages, then we're in for a long wait.

[Paul Calf]

How much money does he actually need? at some point you'd have to say 'yeah that'll so me until death, cheerio fuckers'. Why the endless sucking off the teat?

Because for some people[nb]Psychopaths[/nb] money is a way of keeping score; the way you measure yourself. How much money they have and how much they make quickly becomes the only valid measure of a human. Trump is the same, and so was his father, Fred.

[JaDanketies]

Because for some people[nb]Psychopaths[/nb] money is a way of keeping score; the way you measure yourself. How much money they have and how much they make quickly becomes the only valid measure of a human. Trump is the same, and so was his father, Fred.

Once you have savings of over about £3m, the queen should give you a trophy that says you won capitalism and then should tax everything over that at 100%.

[Paul Calf]

They believe that if you give money to someone and you don't get anything back, you've given them a little bit of prestige and taken some away from yourself. Everything is transactional, even within families.

[Fambo Number Mive]

I'm confused by this "levelling up fund"

Mr Sunak says he has one final announcement.

He says the "most powerful barometer of economic success is the change people see and the pride they feel in the places they call home".

As a result, he announces a new "levelling up fund" worth £4bn.

The chancellor says any local area will be able to bid directly to fund local projects - but they must be delivered within this Parliament "and they must command local support".

They could include a new bypass, upgraded railway stations, less traffic or more libraries, museums, and galleries.

"This government is funding the things people want and places need," he says

I thought levelling up meant ensuring that services in the rest of the UK were like services in the South. If anywhere can bid for this funding, what's to stop the Home Countries putting in a load of bids? Why not just spend £4bn improving services in the North, such as the railway services? Why not build some light rail in Leeds and extend the West Midlands Metro for starters?

I know the answer is "because most of the wealthy people live in London and the Home Counties and Sunak wants their support" but it still seems like such an openly missed opportunity. BBC of course say nothing, they are licking Sunak's bottom.

The Tories seem to be more about "levelling down" by trying to make  public transport in London less good so it's more like the crao public transport outside London.

[idunnosomename]

Think a greencollar is like a posh cucumber. Not sure.

they're all posh cucumbers by the time I'm finished with them

[jobotic]

I work in the public sector. Over the last ten years my pay awards have been between 1.5% and nothing. Where is he getting 4% from.

Those who approve will be those who earn four times what I earn in the city and say "why are you striking about your pension? We didn't strike when they took ours away".

[JaDanketies]

I work in the public sector. Over the last ten years my pay awards have been between 1.5% and nothing. Where is he getting 4% from.

I suspect this is a mean / median / modal average issue. "We've funnelled so much money to Boris Johnson's cousin who we appointed as head of this quango that it has increased the mean average wage of public sector workers by 4%! Those greedy nurses."

[Ferris]

How much money does he actually need? at some point you'd have to say 'yeah that'll so me until death, cheerio fuckers'. Why the endless sucking off the teat?

I've always wondered this. Why not take your filthy lucre and piss off to your mansion in the country? Why the need to keep grifting?

If I had a million quid I'd live off the interest and spend all day gardening and volunteering for charities. Last thing I'd be doing is working out how to make more money I'd never spend. Very strange mentality.

[ASFTSN]

See also people who wisely trot out Ah, well, a million's not that much money these days.

[Harry Badger]

I've always wondered this. Why not take your filthy lucre and piss off to your mansion in the country? Why the need to keep grifting?

Because accumulation of vast sums of money is an addiction like any other.

[JaDanketies]

See also people who wisely trot out Ah, well, a million's not that much money these days.

I think I'd live off the interest on £2 million. A million just wouldn't cut it. I wouldn't turn my nose up at it though.

[Paul Calf]

I think I'd live off the interest on £2 million. A million just wouldn't cut it. I wouldn't turn my nose up at it though.

Yeah, interest rates are really low. You'd be lucky to get 3%. 30k is easily enough to live on - athough it'd be a struggle if you lived in London, especially with a family - but that's fixed. It doesn't track inflation unless interest rates are reliably adjusting for it.

[Zetetic]

I work in the public sector. Over the last ten years my pay awards have been between 1.5% and nothing. Where is he getting 4% from.

I'm guessing a lot of this comes from pay progression within AfC Bands or Civil Service Grades etc.

(Depending when you run the figures, and when people tend to enter the NHS etc., and things like "skills drift", where the NHS tends to employ more expensive professions over time, then you show a strong increase in average pay while the pay for e.g. a newly-qualified nurse starting their first job stays the same.)

[Zetetic]

Good news for English roads, I guess.

The continued attacks on devolution and needs-based funding allocations seem important context.

The way borrowing is working is technically interesting, with it mostly being tied up with QE and (to the extent I understand this) apparently not actually increasing government debt held by anyone else.

[pancreas]

He understands. He just doesn't fucking care.

Are you sure? I'm not sure. I would have said the same thing about McDonnell—he accepted soveregin debt needed to be lower.

I really, really, wouldn't estimate the particular nexus of stupidity, laziness and vindictiveness of the people of that party.

And that's just ....